Overview
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) Review
10+ years of experience with Amazon S3
Storage, yes, but simple. Not for everyone.
It's simple. That's the point.
Amazon S3 offers a cost effective, redundant storage solution to put your mind at ease!
Great for archive data & web apps via API
Amazon S3 - Storage as far as the eye can see; and then further
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) - A Highly Economical, Simple and Easy-to-Use Data Store with Amazing Features
best storage to use comfortably
Simple to use but errors may lead to wrong conclusions
We are happy with AWS S3
S3 is the best choice for asset hosting, from client assets through to your entire website frontend.
Review of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 stores any kind of object you want!
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What is Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
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What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It provides great utility for storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
It is suitable for businesses or organizations of any size to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides management features for organizing data and configuring access controls to meet business, organizational, and compliance requirements.
Amazon S3 Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
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(331)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-21 of 21)A true view on S3
- Image and files uploading is very quick.
- Image loading is very fast no lack of images.
- Provides in cache memory for the quick responses
- Costing is too much, They can reduce the cost
- Configuration at the AWS portal is little bit difficult for beginners they can improve.
- Library to use the S3 can be lighter
Storage, yes, but simple. Not for everyone.
- Scalable
- Reliable
- Well documented
- Hard to use
- Not for non-developers
- Bad online UI
Great for archive data & web apps via API
- Low cost
- Multiple tiers of storage
- Great API
- Not a lot of features.
- Can be complex to set up properly.
I also use it a lot with PHP via the API. We have some custom in-house applications that have a fair amount of data uploaded into them. S3 has been a perfect solution to store these files, taking the load off web servers and never having issues with running out of storage.
- Storing mass amount of data.
- Cheap storage options.
- Versioning of objects.
- Different cost tiers for what you need.
- Notifications on Object changes.
- The UI is clunky and not great.
- It can get costly fast depending on how you use it.
- There are underlying/unknown issues that make you have to consider how to store you data to achieve maximum rewards.
- We use S3 as an entry point (landing zone for data). We can then transform (normalize) the data and store it again.
- S3 has great services built around automating tasks to be done when an object is updated/created/deleted.
- S3 has built-in replication for back up and disaster recovery.
We are happy with AWS S3
- Scales automatically.
- Is always available.
- Is cost effective with different storage tiers.
- Slow access.
- Difficult to manage files on large repositories.
- Users are locked on it as migration to other services isn't easy or cheap.
S3 is the best choice for asset hosting, from client assets through to your entire website frontend.
It solves the business problem of exposing any sort of asset to external users, as well as serves as a complete website hosting and deployment service stack for static websites.
- Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
- Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
- It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
- Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
- The whole AWS ecosystem has a lot of confusing and unintuitive configuration options, and S3 is no exception. Thankfully it's so broadly used that you can reliably find solutions on external sites like StackOverflow.
- Getting IAM permissions just right for Static Website hosting require a little trial and error since S3 defaults to security instead of open access.
- While S3's file type inference is decent, some new file types (such as .wasm) aren't inferred correctly, so you have to configure their MIME types after uploading them in order for them to serve correctly.
Review of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
- Highly available and redundant; we do not worry about the service having downtime
- Simple usage from multiple different frameworks using Amazon's SDKs, or roll your own
- A large number of bucket policies and security adjustments to tailor usage to customer needs
- Regional support for storing assets in particular locations around the world
- Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
- Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
- Very simple to setup and administer.
- Can grow with your storage needs.
- Cost effective.
- Geo redundant.
- Fault tolerant and reliable.
- If not managed correct it could get expensive.
- Searching needs to be improved and is not effective.
- Better reporting would be great.
Simple Storage Service that does a lot more than just providing simple storage for you
- Reliable and secure way to store objects in cloud: Storing any type of file(text, pdf, doc, csv, etc) is very easy with S3. Fetching this stored content as and when you require is also pretty easy and can be done using both the console and AWS CLI. Appropriate permissions can be set up for buckets using IAM roles/policies.
- Versioning in buckets: S3 gives you a very handy feature to store multiple versions of objects stored in a bucket.
- Lifecycle policies: You can set up lifecycle policies in S3 that can move your older objects to IA or Glacier. This setup is very easy and can be done within minutes for a bucket.
- Replication: The cross-region replication that S3 provides is wonderful. Beware of the inter-regional data transfer costs though.
- No support for object versions retention: There can be a retention policy(days or number) for object versions that are stored in S3 so that we don't have to worry about paying extra for all the old versions of an object in the bucket.
- No feature for replication within a region: Currently AWS does not support replication within a region. Also, having to enable versioning for buckets in which you need replication makes it even more costly.
- Confusing pricing: The pricing model of S3 can be a little confusing for a new customer with questions regarding data transfer from other AWS services, between buckets or data transfer to the outside world.
Perfect solution for web and mobile application asset and media storage
- Ensures web and application servers don't get bogged down from serving static assets.
- Works with popular frameworks for easy integration in applications to allow user uploading of additional assets.
- Integrates easily with Amazon Cloudfront as a CDN.
- Very little configuration needed to get started.
- The website UI, while easy to use by even less technical staff, but certain options such as allowing public read for new uploads by default instead of manual selection, requires a bit more technical knowledge. (That said there is generally a custom UI built for users to upload files anyway so in our situation this isn't important).
At the moment there is really no reason for us to choose a different service for this use case. The popularity of S3 means that any new developers working with us are already familiar with how to work with it.
S3 is a great static file hosting service
- Price - S3 is very cheap
- Ease of use - It is an extremely simple service with basic upload, download, and list commands accessible via the web, APIs, and CLIs.
- Security - S3's integration with IAM makes security easy and powerful.
- Advanced searches - Searching within S3 for files can be a very painful process and very slow.
- Dangerous - rogue users can do a lot of damage if you have important data stored in S3
- The web interface can be difficult to use for inexperienced users.
Easiest blob storage out there
- S3 is very good with uptime
- S3 is elastic and infinitely scalable
- S3 is user-friendly
- S3 is not good if you need to copy files a lot; it can be slow
- S3 is not a replacement for a file system. It is blob storage, so things like updates and renames are impossible
- S3 requires globally unique bucket names, which can be a challenge
Amazon S3 : Fast, Secure and Simple Cloud Storage
- Data management and storage
- Quick upload, download and move on EC2 instance
- Security and HIPAA compliance
- Folder sharing with multi level permission
- APIs and libraries to access data through any programming language
- Searching for the document is very hard, it allows only prefix to search the files.
- Also, downloads require more than one click which irritates frequent users.
- Price compared to service is a little bit high, still not a major concern.
Top Marks for S3 Storage and Websites
- Storage! You can store as much as you like in whatever format and structure you like.
- Pay as you go - you only pay for what you use, so your storage costs scale up and down with your storage and access patterns. No more having to provision space ahead of time or having wasted space floating around. It's also fairly inexpensive.
- Static website hosting - really simple and easy to get going with, but surprisingly powerful. You can do everything from simple static websites to full Single Page Applications (assuming its all Javascript).
- It isn't the cheapest out there for storage, but I think still represents good value for money. You do also have a large array of storage options which can lower the cost if you are willing to reduce reliability/robustness.
- You can't use HTTPS off the bat with S3, so you almost always need to put CloudFront (or similar CDN) in front of it. Whilst this isn't a problem, it means it isn't quite as quick and straightforward to get going with as perhaps some other services.
- Whilst generally very low latency, we have observed occasional latency spikes whilst retrieving objects. Assuming you are running a CDN in front of S3 (which you should) then this becomes less problematic, but it probably isn't the best choice if you absolutely must guarantee low latency.
You know you're supposed to use S3. Just do it.
- Nearly every web framework now has integrations with the service as an easy plug-and-play storage solution.
- General integration is so good there are tons of third-party tools like Transmit (for mac) you can mount S3 as a remote disk for easy access, and even Amazon's own web portal for using S3 has gotten quite good.
- It's incredibly easy to offload all the expensive bandwidth operations for your typical website or app to S3, and, assuming your services are not yet HTTP2, you even get the benefits of sharding.
- There is no true hierarchical filesystem in S3. So for example, if you have a file like /images/pizza/1.png, and you delete 1.png it deletes the entire directory structure. Now many tools will place an empty dummy file at /images/pizza to make it appear as if the structure is there – but if you do these operations via api it can be a bit of a gotchya.
- The bucket namespace is global, so it can be really hard to get a sensible bucket name. Honestly no idea why they made that global.
- While you can serve S3 content at your own subdomain, you have to have the proper bucket name to do so and this can get pretty cumbersome. Ideally, there would be a better way to mask S3 buckets at a DNS level.
S3 for Cloud Backup
- Multiple security access levels ensure that one client cannot access another clients data.
- Multiple geographic locations allows us to meet certain audit requirements.
- Simple setup from within many cloud backup clients.
- Security configuration can be a little confusing and sometimes requires making completely new accounts.
Amazon S3 the goto storage spot
- Once set up it is as simple as pointing to it and it works.
- It is fast for putting data on it and taking it off.
- It allows a mixture of data types which makes it ideal for how we use it; we don't have to worry that it would store a data type.
- If you're not a network type and don't understand terms like DNS or routing then it's going to be hard to get it setup correctly. They need to make this process a little more user-friendly for people that are not IT types.
- They should make security more friendly currently you have to have a very good understanding of what your setting so that the outside world does not see all of your data, a security preview would be great also to make sure the security setting is performing correctly.
- Billing is another area which could use some help in making it friendlier, you have to spend a lot of time doing deep dives on your bill to understand why cost just seems to have gone up.
- Security - S3 is great at encrypting traffic at rest and in transit.
- Integration - S3 works great with multiple applications which is great for us since we don't have to be married to a partciluar software solution for online backups.
- Billing - Easy to read and straight forward for clients.
- Ease of use - Pretty difficult to setup if you aren't in the industry. Not something a notice user can setup without spending some time with it.
- Automatically stores previous versions of applications deployed to Elastic Beanstalk, to preserve rollbacks.
- Integrates with Python applications using the boto library.
- Serves static and media files quickly and reliably.
- The documentation about caching, CORS protection, and permissions in general could be easier to comprehend. For experts on cloud architecture, I'm sure it's fine, but as a novice, it was very difficult to wrap my head around.
- Could come with some Amazon-vetted JavaScript, especially a framework like jQuery, Angular, etc. Having to upload my own copies of frameworks like jQuery into S3 so that I'm not dependent on an external CDN is a little redundant.
- I'm not sure if it already comes with virus protection or if that would even make sense, but if not, that could be a feature. Really I have almost no complaints.
S3 is a great, reliable place to keep your data if you are already using AWS, but don't fall down the rabbit hole of services.
- One of the main attractions of S3 is the quality of it's basic services, including security, stored data integrity, and data availability from almost anywhere via almost any system. The snapshot service is one of the best services offered through a cloud, and has always been a required feature for any SAN device I potentially purchase.
- S3 has a strong partnership with EMC, which has allowed S3 to offer a wide variety of services and features that would normally require the customer to purchase an EC device, which opens up high-level storage to smaller companies at an affordable rate.
- S3 has a major lead over other cloud providers due to the S3 service, and the wide range of capabilities. Instead of being a simple "drive" it can natively operate as a web server, hosting a wide array of static content, which reduces server load and costs. This is a major advantage, especially for someone operating within the free tier, where every little bit of processing power is an important resource.
- The final selling point of S3 for myself, was the ability to connect into a wide variety of services, both local Amazon services, such as CloudFront CDN, and remote non-Amazon services such as WordPress backup solutions, which ends up keeping all of my data across the organization at one easy to access, and secure location.
- While S3 has a huge list of available services, the services themselves tend to be lacking, such as the web server capability being able to only host static HTML content.
- The additional capabilities have gotten a bit "out of hand" in terms of the amount of services available, which seemingly follow no particular grouping, which can make venturing beyond basic S3 storage services a daunting, and confusing endeavor.
- Not having any storage "packages" for serving data is a big negative, as we would feel more comfortable with a set package, and a known monthly cost, rather than a fluctuating service billed by time x data.
S3 is only place to keep files
- high availability
- cheap
- encryption at rest
- s3cmd makes it easy to sync
- I would love to be able to use s3 easily for ftp type work
- I would like to see s3 console searchable
- I would like to see a better way to manage access. The IAM/bucket policy process is confusing